In the nearly 15 years since the death of beloved poet William Stafford, his reputation has only grown. Author of 67 books, a former Oregon poet laureate and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and the winner of a National Book Award, Stafford's presence in the Oregon literary landscape owes its vigor not only to his 30-year career teaching at Lewis & Clark College, but to the simplicity and accessibility of the poems constituting his life's work.

As longtime readers of Stafford's poetry know, there is a deep undercurrent of conviction in the man himself, a darker history found sparely in his posthumous collection "The Way It Is." The newest compilation of Stafford's poems, "Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947," (Graywolf Press, $24, 128 pages) contains many never-before-published poems written during the source of those convictions: his internment during World War II as a conscientious objector.

The only major writing Stafford dedicated to his experience as a registered pacifist, and his consequent four-year alternative service in the Civilian Public Service, was his beautifully rendered prose account, "Down in My Heart," which deals with the moral and social implications of holding forth on the dictum of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in an era where disagreeing with the declaration of war and the wave of patriotism that accompanied it nearly meant treason.

Stafford's early poems come at a crux in modern American history, a time when the country is embroiled in a five-year war, where dissidence has been met with steady opposition, when those who initially raised their voices against the war found themselves frustrated and unacknowledged. Stafford saw his own life in this light, and the poems build in intensity throughout this collection -- from uneasiness to anxiety to outright indignation. These are the clearly spoken words of a man who in "Apology" says of his nation, "Now I feel I am a prisoner here."

Editor Fred Marchant has organized the book chronologically into three sections, spanning Stafford's years as a young man in the Great Depression, his virtual imprisonment in a variety of wartime labor camps, and the postwar readjustment to society. With Marchant's guidance, readers witness Stafford's struggle to find faith amid his uneasy military-styled life, coupled with his struggle to make sense by finding his own poetic voice.

Long-term readers of Stafford's work will find evidence of his lifelong style in these early roots. Readers new to Stafford will find an entrance to a lifetime of enduring themes in Stafford's oeuvre: home, family, memory, landscape and the endless quest for the inner life. The book serves as both a record of an uncertain existence and a historical document of a population nearly erased from history.

Ultimately, the relevance of Stafford's "Another World Instead" is to reconfigure our ideas of patriotism and protest, of conflict and peace. It draws our attention to the disenfranchised, those whose ideas remain invisible. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said, the way to get passers-by to listen to your struggle is to sing. Stafford spent a lifetime writing songs such as the poem "Los Prietos [I]" in which he finds a common conviction in this soul-searching music: "This is the land we are exiled to from a world fighting. / We look at each other and sing all the songs we have heard."